I was inspired by the sunflower growing outside of my office window. It is October in Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada yet this sunflower bloom is so alive.

Some of us as we get close to the end of something begin to coast but let this sunflower inspire you to stay engaged until the end. Engage near the end of the day, near the end of a project, near the end of a meeting, near the end of the year, near the end of your career.

Don’t let the autumn of your career mentally prevent you from being fully engaged.

You still have much to experience and contribute.

David Zinger is an employee engagement expert and speaker who is inspired by engaging with many things around him.

Introduction. Here are 10 ways you can flourish by creating nourishing work. Embrace these ways as invitations to flourish. They are not rules or tips you must follow. You are the expert on your own wellbeing. I trust these ways will give you a nudge in the right direction. The 10 ways offer a pathway to wellbeing through well-doing because specific actions are strong triggers to install and sustain wellbeing at work. This post was created in conjunction with a one hour session I facilitated for Nurses Week at Winnipeg’s Heath Sciences Centre on May 11th.

Start your day off right. Establish a solid morning routine that gets you out of bed on the right foot. Perhaps you go for a jog first thing in the morning. Or you sit by the fireplace and hug a cup of coffee. Maybe you write for 20 minutes. Or you help your children pack their lunches for school. The specifics of your routine matter less than having a routine that effectively and efficiently triggers engaged wellbeing for you. I encourage you to read a post on my morning routine and follow this up by reading a new morning routine from someone each week at My Morning Routine. Other people’s routines give clues and cues on how to construct a morning routine that works for us.

Begin each day at work with the double endings in mind. Stephen Covey said, “begin with the end in mind” while William Bridges said that all transitions begin with an end. Know the results you want from your work and also determine what must end for those results to be achieved. Take one or two minutes every day to determine the results you are working towards that week while also attending to what must end for wellbeing at work to begin. Perhaps you want to finish a project this week and you must stop focusing on a nonproductive task. Perhaps you want to improve patient safety and what must end is a strained relationship with your manager. Know your end (result) and your endings (what must stop).

Install PERMAnent wellbeing. I don’t care for the term positive psychology, it sounds too much like saccharine and pop psychology. I know that is not the case but I know many people are dismissive of positive psychology because of this. I appreciate the research behind this discipline, especially the work of Martin Seligman. Work offers opportunities for both happiness and wellbeing right inside the very work itself. Focus your work on building and sustaining PERMAnent flourishng with: Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning and Accomplishment.

Create meaning and purpose for your work. Know why you work. Perhaps you work because you love your hospital. Perhaps you work because you care about patients. Perhaps you work to give your family the best life possible. Perhaps you work because work enriches you with relationships and achievement. We do not necessarily share the same why of working. I encourage you to determine your meaning. Here is my response to the meaning of life and here is the response of so many others. Use these sources to create a strong scaffold of meaning to support you and your work. As the Dalai Lama declared, “The question is not to know what is the meaning of life, but what meaning I can give to my life.”

Don’t forget to wear your SCARF at work. David Rock knows about your brain at work. When we align our work with SCARF (Status, Consistency, Autonomy, Relatedness and Fairness) our work – works better. Here is a brief article outlining the SCARF model at work. Rock’s book on Your Brain at Work is an insightful book on how to improve your day with your brain in mind by following one couple as they proceed through their day and how they could improve their day if they made better use of their brains.

Pair Mindfulness-East with Mindfulness-West. Mindfulness has been sweeping through workplaces around the globe. Did you know there are two types of mindfulness? Mindfulness-East is the perspective of being aware in each moment of what you are doing without judgement. Mindfulness-West, developed by Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer teaches how to engage by actively noticing novelty and distinctions. Noticing novelty and distinction engages you and brings new life to your day.

Eliminate the negative. Baumeister and others have shown that bad is stronger than good. Before you get busy trying to add additional things in your day as the pathway to wellbeing ensure you address your challenges and bad events. Some researchers suggest that bad is 2 or 3 times stronger than good. When something bad happens do not be surprised at how it can knock you off kilter and how it begins to feel so permanent, pervasive, and personal. Remember to eliminate the negative before accentuating the positive.

Take the 90 second pause. Jill Bolte Taylor a neuroscience researcher, who also suffered a stroke, suggested that the shelf life of an emotion is 90-seconds. This would mean that upset or negative emotions last only about 90 seconds, yet for many of us they seem to last a lifetime. Give yourself 90 seconds from the moment you feel a negative emotion before you act on that emotion. Also know that you must feed negative emotions every 90 seconds to keep them alive. We feed it with fragments of tragic stories, feelings of being wronged, and a multitude of tiny, almost unconscious mechanisms, to keep being upset. If you remain upset ninety seconds after the initial emotion it is essential to ask yourself: “How am I feeding my upset to keep it alive?”

Sharpen progress while making setbacks dull. Most of us fail to maximize the benefits of progress and minimize the impact of setbacks. Progress and setbacks are so pervasive at work and daily life that we often fail to fully notice their impact. End each day by taking a minute to notice what stood out for you that day. When progress stands out ensure you let it soak in, celebrate it, and determine ways to extend it. When setbacks stand out ensure you determine what you can do next, how you might learn from it, or what you can do to let it go. Know that work and life often resemble a real-life game of snakes and ladders and our job is to climb ladders and squish snakes.

Use 22 tools to exit from grumpiness. Does work make you grumpy or do you find yourself surrounded by grumpy people?. I just completed an e-book, illustrated by John Junson, on 22 Tools to Overcome Grumpiness. Click on the cover below to enjoy this short, yet engaging, book.

A Short Reading List. Here are 9 books that can improve your motivation and skills to flourish with nourishing work:

Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle.

Ellen Langer, Mindfulness.

David Rock, Your Brain at Work.

Steven Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

Tom Rath, Are You Fully Charged?

William Bridges, Transitions: Making Sense of Life’s Changes.

Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Martin Seligman, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Wherever You Go There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation is Everyday Life.

—

David Zinger is an employee engagement speaker and expert from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada who works around the globe helping organizations and individuals improve work engagement and engaged wellbeing.

Employee engagement involves change. Virgina Satir, an exceptional family therapist once taught me that people do not resist change. I asked her why people didn’t change and she responded that “the gravity of the familiar keeps pulling us back into its orbit.”

What people resist is being compelled or coerced to change. In the dying days of leadership command and control we still seem to want to make people change and we are very poor at inviting people to change.

I loved (a strong choice or words for a blog post) Daniel Markovitz’s Harvard Business Blog post on May 16: No One Likes to Be Changed. Here are a few of his pearls of change wisdom:

I propose that we dispense with the concept of “change management” entirely. History shows that’s a recipe guaranteed to foment fear, resistance, and — ultimately —failure.

Research shows that there’s actually a decrease in cognitive function when people feel as though they lack control over their work environment. Moreover, repetitive change initiatives — particularly ones that include layoffs — inevitably lead to cynicism and often to a kind of learned helplessness.

The key is to pose a business problem to the workers actually doing the job and then having them design the change

The real secret to successful change, therefore, is not to change people at all. Let them figure out how to solve their own problems, and they’ll do the rest.

If employee engagement is a problem in your organization are you letting employees be the ones to solve it? As my friends at Juice ask: As a leader or manager, are you a parent or a partner with your employees?

David

David Zinger is an expert global employee engagement speaker and consultant who brings the engagement down to earth while striving to enliven the pyramid of employee engagement to help leaders, managers, and organizations increase engagement and results while also building relationships. David has worked on employee engagement from Winnipeg to Warsaw, Saskatoon to South Africa, and Boston to Barcelona. In 2013, David has spoken in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and Toronto. Contact him today at: david@davidzinger.com

My new free eBook Waggle is available today. You will enjoy this short book with so many images and insights. It looks great on an Ipad, tablet, or smartphone. This book based on spending 3 summers with honeybees, office objects, and computers offers you 39 ways to improve work based on 13 Waggles.

I encourage you to read the book, put an action into practice, and act like a honeybee by passing the book on and pollinating these ideas with co-workers, friends and other organizations. To read or download the eBook click on the cover below or click here.

David Zinger is the author of Waggle and two other books. He is founder and host of the 5900 member Employee Engagement Network and he applies the pyramid of employee engagement to improve organizations, work, and engagement through simple, small and significant actions. To start working with David Zinger, email him at david@davidzinger.com

A good employee engagement speaker engages

I have been to a lot of conferences and witnessed many presentations on employee engagement. I have spoken on employee engagement on at least 200 occasions. The best presentations engage the attendees with each other and with the topic even in a one hour keynote. We don’t need 100 PowerPoint slides and the speaker rattling off statistics about engagement like an auctioneer voicing bids at an auction. We need to ensure that employee engagement sessions transform the noun of engagement into the verb of engage.

Here are 9 things I do to make sure they speech is engaging.

I use just one slide or no slides. This also help me to ensure that I don’t try to cover too much. Many times I tell audience when I show my first slide that this is my first slide and only slide. I have had audiences applaud then they hear it is just one slide. I find that audiences often prefer one slide to no slides because it gives them something to look at. This slide I use most is the Pyramid of Employee Engagement. See this slide at the end of these 9 points.

Within every 15 to 20 minute period I encourage the audience to engage in an exercise to bring the concepts or practices to life.

I never make my audience engage in an exercise or meet with a partner. I invite them to do this and respect their choice not to engage. Real engagement starts with authentic and compelling invitations.

I offer online resources people can use to get more information after the speech/facilitation so that they don’t feel compelled to write everything down.

I rely more on stories than statistics and each statistic should have a story behind it.

I voice tentative statements so that audiences can determine for themselves if the ideas or practices are viable or valuable. We learn in a richer more expansive way when we are given good tentative information.

I honor the experience that many people will learn more by what they say than by what they hear.

My VIA signature strength is humor and playfulness so I ensure my speeches have both humor and playfulness built in to the design and delivery of the session.

By the end of the speech I know I have been successful if I have a hard time getting the audiences’ attention back from an invited exercise because they are so engaged with what they are doing.

David

David Zinger is an expert global employee engagement speaker and consultant who brings the engagement down to earth while striving to enliven the pyramid of employee engagement to help leaders, managers, and organizations increase engagement and results while also building relationships. David has worked on employee engagement from Winnipeg to Warsaw, Saskatoon to South Africa, and Boston to Barcelona. In 2013, David has spoken in Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Berlin, New York, Chicago, and Toronto.